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The title is a little bit misleading though. I have almost nothing dev related on my Windows machine and use Linux VM instead.
Here is the components my dev environment consists of:
The actual product doesn't matter here. As I mentioned earlier VirtualBox would work as well. I use VMware because I used to it and I blindly believe in rumors that it is faster than VirtualBox.
Along with some virtual machines I installed out of curiosity there is my main virtual machine configured. I call it **Workstation** and I store there everything work/personal projects/this blog related.
The workstation is driven by **Ubuntu Server** with no Xorg installed. Whenever I need to run graphical Linux app I use VcXsrv.
One more thing worth to mention is that network in the workstation is configured with NAT so I always know IP address of the VM regardless the network my laptop is connected to. Even if my laptop has no internet connection I still can connect to my VM with no issues and can keep working.
The VM is always in such state because I connect to it with SSH so I keep it in a separate virtual screen and if I need to suspend or wake it up I just do a "four finger swipe" to switch to the screen with only VMware running.
I love WSL. I also like how WSL team switched to VM approach for their WSL2. WSL just doesn't fit my workflow. I like to fire up the VM, work and suspend it so I can wake it up again when needed in a second and continue from exactly that state I stopped in.
To stop WSL I literally need to stop all the main process like Nginx, Postgres, Tmux. Tmux main purpose is to be never stopped.
I don't want to keep WSL's VM running all the time.
So, even though I like the idea of WSL I can't use it.
The reason I use it is I haven't found anything better. It's pretty lightweight, quick and configurable.
It has some issues with default configuration (CTRL+C copies text instead of process termination), Alt+Backspace doesn't remove a word (at least by default) and some other small issues that can be fixed.
UI is super configurable too. I was able to remove tabs and scrollbar to make UI clean.
I tried lots of editors and I constantly switch from one to another but Vim is definitely the one I spent most of the time in directly or implicitly (evil-mode in Emacs, VsCodeVim, Vintage in Sublime, IdeaVim in IDEs from JetBrains).
I'm very much used to it and to its keybindings.
You can find my vimrc HERE
It also plays nicely with Tmux.
A window manager for my terminal.
I use Tmuxinator for every project I have. In case I had to restart my VM I can execute `tmuxinator project-name` and I automatically get a new session with 3 windows created and Vim window focused with all background jobs required by the project running.
Shortly - I like how Windows work.